Covid-19 in France far earlier than thought

The patient was admitted to the Jean-Verdier hospital in Bondy (Seine-Saint-Denis), northeast of Paris in late December 2019. The Covid-19 infection was retrospectively confirmed on May 3.

The positive test calls into question everything that the French authorities had believed to be true about the arrival of Covid-19 in France.

Until now, the first “officially counted” cases dated to January 24.

These were a man of Chinese origin, and two tourists who had travelled to Wuhan, China - the original epicentre of the outbreak.

These patients were admitted to the CHU hospital in Bordeaux, and the Bichat hospital in Paris.

But the December 2019 case was discovered during retrospective tests by Professor Yves Cohen, head of intensive care at the Avicenne (Bobigny) and Jean-Verdier (Bondy) hospitals.

A specialist medical review on the retrospective testing is set to be published this week.

Professor Cohen explained to news service FranceInfo: “Of the patients we tested, 24% had a history that could correspond with Covid-19. We redid the PCR [polymerase chain reaction] tests, to try to find traces of coronavirus. Of these 14 patients, one tested positive.”

The tests were done again, to check for false negatives, and the same test came back positive a second time.

The patient was a man in his fifties. His file includes a scan “that showed signs that could totally be linked with Covid-19, with high levels of inflammation, which corresponds with the virus”, said Professor Cohen.

Dr. Olivier Bouchard, infectious diseases specialist at the Avicenne hospital, told newspaper Le Parisien: “PCR tests on a patient show that he did indeed have Covid. We indeed had a case in France from December 27. These PCR tests from the lungs were kept, and we were able to re-analyse them.”

The hospital called the patient, “so he could explain how he had come to be infected with Covid-19”.

But he said that he did not work, and had not travelled in any of the areas that the infection was circulating at the time. He said that his two children had also become ill “with the same infection”, but his wife had not.

All three recovered and are now doing well.

Teams at the Avicenne hospital do not believe that this man is “patient zero” - the first person in France to have the virus.

Instead, Professor Cohen said that their hypothesis was that the man’s wife had picked up the infection at her place of work - a supermarket - and had “transmitted the virus in an asymptomatic way to her husband and children”.

He said: “We have deducted from this that Covid-19 was already in France in December, because the first patient we have found to be positive dates from December 27. But we cannot go further.”

Professor Cohen has now called for “an epidemiological enquiry” to investigate the lines of contamination.

Dr. Bouchard, in Le Parisien, said: “[This result] suggests that the virus was circulating much earlier than thought across the country, from the end of December. This is not surprising, when we know that the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared that it was circulating in China from December 8, at least.

“With widespread travel it is to be expected that the virus would have appeared quickly in France.”